~ "Here Am I, Send Me!"

Great Missionary Lives: Saint Damien

Saint Damien was a Catholic priest from Belgium, in the 1800s, who served for 15 years and eventually died at a leper colony on an island off the coast of Hawaii. While we would not agree with all that he taught, his example of radical love should be imitated by all of us.

Damien had recognized that if he really wanted to win the hearts of his new flock, he had to be willing to touch them, to eat with them, to smoke the communal pipe as one of them….Father Damien wouldn’t die for another fifteen long years, but the day he identified himself as one of the afflicted was the day he truly gave his life away.